This article is a cheat sheet, the type you could never obtain for any other investment other than crypto. So please follow the steps carefully to ensure that no mistakes are made.

Read more

Their ability to assist with trading, valuing or transacting cryptocurrencies is obvious (‘I have made 260,000,000,000 satoshis of profit’ is not exactly intuitive).

However, if we follow a bitcoin maximalist line of reasoning (‘Bitcoin is the only true crypto, as it doesn't have a CEO’), stablecoins will ultimately be redundant when the fiat currencies they represent have a value of zero.

I have discussed the ‘death of fiat currencies’ perspective in another article. I will use this article to provide an overview of the major stablecoin projects and their differences. This will help you to understand the risks and features of each stablecoin to help you keep more of your wealth and profits.

As we shall see, not all stablecoins are equal. The most significant (Tether - USDT) has a shady and controversial past. Some are very centralised around a particular exchange (BUSD), and others have caused the most dramatic and painful collapse ($50 billion+) in crypto history (UST) while marketing themselves as a ‘low-risk’ crypto investment.

Let’s examine eleven different stablecoin projects, in terms of their design to understand how each stablecoin works and what that means for you and your money.

Read more

The document is used to train recruits in how to implement an emergency action plan effectively.

The document begins with a disclaimer that “this plan was not actually designed as a joke”.

Obviously, to many empiricists, the idea of zombies and the US military in battle sounds like a low-budget disaster movie with a blushing rotten tomatoes score.

However, it did get me thinking about an emergency action plan for your money, should the worst happen to the fiat currency system.

As I write this (October 2022), rumours of a ‘large banking institution’ collapsing are all over Twitter. But, of course, with Twitter being Twitter, these rumours could be considered trivial if it weren’t for the stock prices of some of the institutions referenced (in particular, Credit Suisse) experiencing their share price plummeting by over 60% in ten months.

It seems Halloween has come early for Credit Suisse as it fights a tirade of questions about its balance sheet and its ongoing viability. This problem is unlikely to be helped by the fact that the chairman of Credit Suisse is a gentleman called Axel Lehmenn.

I have had to provide a link to verify that fact as if this were a work of fiction, the idea that the chairman of the potential catalyst of the next major financial crisis shares his name with Lehman Brothers, the financial institution that was the first bank to be declared bankrupt in 2008, would be considered vulgar, improbable and incredible.

So, what would be a good action plan if another financial crisis hits tomorrow and global governments cannot supply the necessary capital required to keep fiat currencies healthy for another election term?

Let’s look at the four simple steps you would need to take to ensure you keep your wealth if the £, $ or other currency suddenly collapsed and how you could make your money bulletproof.

Read more

August was a more settled time for cryptoassets, with not a lot happening from a price perspective. However, beyond the prices, the market psychology was wary and focused on the battles between regulation, autonomy and the looming Ethereum merge.

Optimism around the merge enabled the psychology of the market to bounce back out of the fear territory and into more optimism, with bitcoin briefly reaching a monthly high of around $25,000 before dropping back below $20,000 by the end of the month.

The narrative behind the drop was centred on regulation, with a privacy-centric smart-contract platform called Tornado cash dominating the news for all the wrong reasons.

On the 8th of August, the US Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash, affectionately known as a ‘crypto mixer’, on money laundering charges. Tornado cash enabled anyone who wanted to obfuscate a cryptocurrency transaction using a similar process to Tor. Its principal purpose was to facilitate privacy, but it was being misused for crime.

According to the indictment, of the seven billion dollars processed by Tornado cash since 2019, $1 billion had been linked to crime.

Crypto investors weren’t surprised by the sanctions against Tornado; more than the US government arrested innocent developers rather than the criminal end users. The developers were regular programmers and privacy advocates using tornado cash for legitimate reasons, not crime. It’s like Tim Burners-lee being arrested after inventing the internet because his work enabled the endemic operations of filesharing via The Pirate Bay.

Naturally, the war between privacy advocates, regulators, and crime rages. Crypto enables users to do whatever they like with their money, which includes crime. Regulators would do well to remember that regulation itself is not a panacea for eliminating financial misconduct.

Unfortunately, it’s an ongoing narrative within the world of financial technology, and there will always be another Tornado cash operation for regulators to target and add to the scapegoat narrative that cryptocurrencies are ‘dirty’ or ‘crime-ridden’ when the traditional world of finance make crypto seem like an economic convent, by comparison.

Portfolio Highlights

This month saw the launch of masternodes as a service (MAAS) for TradeAssist members. This is effectively equivalent to venture capital, using crypto, where a single project is picked and backed with a specific amount of capital ($20,000) by an investor. Using this method, investors can practice crypto essentialism by ignoring 99% of the crypto market and focusing on the 1% with the highest demonstratable potential.

Two projects are currently offered as masternodes. Syscoin and DefiChain. Both have demonstratable potential to provide an investor with ten times their invested capital (around $20,000) in around two years.

Using the masternode model, investors can also take custody of their capital via their own private wallet, earn a yield of hundreds of dollars a month to invest (and compound their returns) and own a part of the infrastructure of crypto by running a server facilitating cryptocurrency transactions for users 24/7/365.

Read more

Website Whitepaper Binance Academy Twitter Coin Market Cap Github Chart

Syscoin (SYS) launched in 2014 as a fork of Litecoin. Following a successful initial coin offering (ICO) which raised $750,000 (at the time, 1500 BTC), 750 BTC were allegedly stolen by the company responsible for managing the token launch (Moolah). These funds have never been recovered.

Following this, the Syscoin team began from scratch on Syscoin 2.0, which launched in May 2016. The upgrade included a new graphical user interface and wallet, rather than a purely command line, as had been with Syscoin 1. In addition, Syscoin 2.0 was launched via a new legal entity called Blockchain Foundry, run by the team behind Syscoin, to ensure the launch was successful.

Syscoin 3 was launched in May 2018 and was one of the first blockchains to integrate Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) capability.

Syscoin 4, launched in June 2019, introduced the capabilities of Bitcoin and Ethereum bridges with these networks. These updates make Syscoin 99% cheaper and more secure than either Bitcoin or Ethereum (see figure 1). Not only this, but the bridge ensures that the Syscoin network is interoperable with any Ethereum token (technically called an ERC-20 token), which includes most stablecoins and over 2000 other tokens, all of which can, in theory, operate via the syscoin network.

Read more

Using tokenomics, any crypto project can be analysed to determine what a future price will likely be achieved over a given timeframe. It is also possible to rank cryptocurrency projects by quality using a tokenomic framework to assess where is likely to be best to invest your capital.

In this article, I will examine three tokens from a tokenomic perspective, Bitcoin, DefiChain and Dogecoin. These tokens represent a spectrum from best to worst in terms of tokenomics.

There is more to investing than pure tokenomics; however, beginning with tokenomics is a great place to start selecting which projects are worth investigating further versus which ones to ignore.

Let’s start by examining the underlying assumption of tokenomics, a concept everyone already implicity understands; the law of supply and demand.

Read more

We may have a bottom price for Bitcoin ($17,600) and other digital assets that were not as bad as people feared (or felt) in June.

Whether this is genuinely the bottom of the bear market remains to be seen, but with Bitcoin now above the 200-week average, things are looking up.

Either way, we are firmly in relief rally territory, where market psychology is more optimistic, despite the low prices. Around here, (long-term) smart money investing is in full swing.

Investing is exactly what I have been doing at these prices for July after launching the TradeAssist Masternode as a service feature (more about this later). So far, this has been the most popular offering from TradeAssist, raising £64,000 of investor capital in the first week (with more on the horizon).

A long-term focus on these prices helps eliminate the psychological need for confirmation that further price declines are not likely. If they happen, they are likely to be short-term and present additional opportunities rather than be a source of concern.

There are many opportunities at these prices; for simplicity, I am targeting two projects, DeFiChain and Syscoin, as these have a masternode model representing the gold standard of security, yield generation and utility in crypto.

But what about the broader market?

While there is still a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in the market, this does not appear to be affecting prices in the same way as they did in June. Bitcoin, at least at the time of writing, seems to be resilient to dropping lower (or even approaching) $20,000, with any sell-off quickly bought up, no matter who steps down as CEO or how many crypto wallets of other projects are hacked.

Masternodes (utilising offline storage) cannot be hacked but can still generate a yield. Bitcoin (stored offline) cannot be hacked. Some Bitcoin investors wish they could hack their cold storage, but it’s impossible without a connection.

Once again, the market is testing investors’ levels of due diligence and eliminating those looking for ‘easy returns’. Having said this, you can never say never in crypto - a statement that customers of Celsius, Luna/UST know all-too-well. You can quantify and eliminate risk, however.

The majority won’t invest here and will ultimately regret it because they will follow the herd and wait for a bottom. So the only way to make a profit is to either be already exposed or invest at these levels and live with the uncertainty.

The golden rule for these markets is select a high-quality project; if prices drop - buy more.

On that note, let’s look at the fund performance over the last month.

Read more

In the domain of theoretical physics, there is a hypothesis that there is not just one universe but many universes co-existing all at once. It’s argued that every decision we make creates a new universe that we all cross into depending on the outcome of that decision.

This head-spinning theory is known as the multiverse theory.

I want to borrow this concept for how to think about crypto investing and introduce the idea that, thanks to the invention of Bitcoin, the very definition of money has been reinvented.

Finally, I want to prove that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin will ultimately come to represent the only type of money that retains or even grows its purchasing power indefinitely.

I want to use this article to convince you that future generations will look back and laugh at our present-day traditional finance system using essentially worthless pounds, dollars and euros.

Modern fiat currency central banking will have the same effect on future generations as us looking back to routine bloodletting, drilling holes in our heads to relieve headaches and consuming pure mercury that were once common recommended (but counterproductive) ‘treatments’ in early medicine.

But first, let’s look at the two competing types of monetary systems which exist today and their significant differences.

Read more

When investors think about cryptocurrency, most usually think about bitcoin or, if not specific tokens they have invested in or want to invest in. This is the first level of investing in crypto. At this level, the reasons for owning a crypto project can be vague, varied or even vulgar; in the case of dogecoin, ‘because it’s fun’. Nevertheless, this is how most, if not all, investors begin their crypto journey.

After some time (maybe after losing money), investors want to understand more and become second-level investors. Second-level investors may want to understand concepts such as the underlying blockchain technology (‘what is the transaction throughput of Ethereum?’) or the code behind a Web3 application. Eventually, it may become second nature to consider the properties of a specific blockchain protocol or even the programming language on which a particular token operates. Second-level investing takes more time, effort and due diligence than the first level of investing but, on average, usually yields better results.

The pinnacle of long-term value investing with crypto, I believe, is with high-quality masternodes. Masternodes represent a third level available to sophisticated investors where they (ideally) not only understand their investment in depth - or have the capacity to - but own a part of its infrastructure. Their investment not only generates a return through price appreciation - in the same way that first-level investors do - but also generates a yield. This yield has the power to generate a liquid, risk-free return - even if the token price falls!

At the third level, investors ask questions such as ‘what is the best way to ensure my crypto cannot be hacked?’ and ‘how can I maximise my return without relying on a speculative price increase’? Both of these questions can be solved using masternodes.

Masternodes are property investments for the cryptocurrency sector. However, masternodes are actually superior to property investments as they are liquid, low-risk, relatively short-term and can be quantified using a valuation methodology invented for stocks that has been in use for almost a century called value investing.

As anyone familiar with The Intelligent Investor (as published in five editions by Benjamin Graham and later popularised by Warren Buffet) knows, it takes time to generate the best returns. The book laid out techniques for determining the fair value of stocks and investing in undervalued securities. It’s no secret that Warren doesn’t like (or - by his own admission understand) crypto, but precisely the same principles used during value investing can be applied to any crypto project - especially masternodes - since these projects resemble small technology companies, as we shall see.

But how do you actually own a masternode? What makes a masternode ‘high-quality’? What are the risks with running a masternode, and how can you reduce these? Finally, how can you determine the most attractive masternode opportunities?

Let me show you.

Read more

June 2022 was bitcoin’s worst month since 2011, with the asset dropping by almost 40%. This was in addition to the 38% decline from the 1st of April to the end of May 2022, examined in my previous performance snapshot.

Arguably things were worse across the rest of the crypto sector.

Following the fallout of LUNA/UST - now TerraClassicUSD and TerraClassic - in May, attempts to revive the Terra project, the most recent being migrating all aspects over to the Polygon network, failed to inspire much investor confidence.

The institutions connected to TerraLuna started to collapse after being forced to liquidate their now negligible holdings setting off a chain of contagious misery.

Among them was Three Arrows Capital, a multi-billion dollar crypto hedge fund whose management have subsequently disappeared without a trace. Before its collapse, Three Arrows had been one of the crypto sector’s largest and most highly regarded hedge funds.

Some commentators have referred to Three Arrows collapse as crypto’s ‘Lehman Brothers’ moment - a reference to the American bank which defaulted at the start of the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis, almost taking the global mortgage market with it.

In further negative news, on the 12th of June, Celsius Network, one of the largest crypto CeFi (centralised finance) institutions, abruptly ceased allowing investor withdrawals without warning. Investors watched with horror as over $12 billion (as of May 2022) of capital ceased to be under their control and no longer felt like their money.

Locking up $12 billion of assets has understandably concerned and angered the wider crypto community and highlighted the importance for investors to own their assets outright. Most investors are now examining whether to entrust significant parts of their portfolios to third parties with ambiguous, opaque, high-risk business practices.

Rumour prevailed, with analysts hypothesising that the company was bankrupt and would ultimately collapse. However, Celsius has so far paid back $1 billion to its institutional creditors behind the scenes without commenting publically.

With withdrawals still not possible at the time of publication, I suspect the lack of communication will ultimately damage the company beyond recovery. In addition to an economic bankruptcy, their ultimate downfall might be public relations bankruptcy. For this reason, if withdrawals ever resume, the outflows will be sustained and massive.

At the time of writing, the ultimate endgame for this crypto bear market is still uncertain and, I suspect, not over. The collapse of significant crypto institutions and similar events have evaporated any optimism and hope from the crypto market, effectively resetting its psychology to how it was in 2018/19 despite the contextually higher prices, wider adoption and improved technology.

Investor psychology, rather than any legitimate issue with crypto, make prices more likely to dip lower for a few weeks until bitcoin below $20,000 becomes perceived as ‘normal’ and an opportunity rather than a threat.

Against the broader backdrop of economic uncertainty, worldwide inflation at multi-decade highs, central banks raising interest rates (in a desperate attempt to abate inflation) and the threat of a bear market for securities, crypto is just another asset class weathering a strong financial storm. Unfortunately, making money during these conditions does feel like attempting to put out the sun using a fire blanket.

Yet, there is hope.

One stark difference between 2018 and 2022 is the tone of traditional financial institutions. In 2018, they were one of the harshest critics of cryptocurrency, regularly denouncing it and attacking the sector with glee.

In 2022, following Celsius’ collapse, Goldman Sachs offered to buy the distressed crypto institution for $2 billion. JP Morgan prefers to make bullish statements and predictions about Bitcoin rather than Real Estate - a contrast to their 2017 policy of firing staff for even mentioning Bitcoin.

Even governments and multi-billion dollar companies have become bitcoin whales, led by Microstrategy, which owns almost 130,000 bitcoin and Tesla (43,200). At a national level, governments including Bulgaria, Ukraine, and even the United States own 260,000 bitcoin between them!

Bitcoin, at least, is no longer an economic outsider but is becoming an increasing part of the global financial system, for better or worse.

Where does this leave us?

In a recent article, I stated that I believe the bottom for significant cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, is close; any purchase below $20,000 or $1200 for Ether is ‘safe’ if your time horizon is measured in months or years.

While the further downside is undoubtedly possible, I implore you to not become complacent.

Any exposure during the prices of early 2022 to high-quality prominent crypto projects will likely be profitable again sooner than it may feel right now. It’s perfectly possible to see new all-time highs for significant crypto projects by 2025, at the latest.

Be patient ‘smart money’ rather than impatient ‘dumb money’.

Dumb money is panicking at these prices and experiencing wild swings of emotion, not unlike the financial markets themselves. They either have no additional capital to invest or have lost a considerable (80%+) portion of their portfolio.

Rather than panic sell, ignore crypto altogether or assume it’s all over and there are no opportunities, history tells us that the best thing to do when prices sell off is to hold what you already have or, ideally, buy more.

Read more

The word, effectively synonymous with the phrase ‘it’s a scam’, is often levelled at crypto investors to strike fear into their investment decisions.

If there is one thing that popular consciousness knows about the word ‘Ponzi’, it’s that it’s not a good thing.

For this reason, investors know to avoid the hallmarks of Ponzi schemes, from multi-level marketing systems with no fundamental business basis to investment schemes which seem to generate too ‘good to be true’ returns.

It may surprise you to learn that the concept of a Ponzi scheme is not modern and not unique to crypto.

The largest Ponzi in history was a securities scheme worth $65 billion when it collapsed after running undetected for over four decades alongside some of the best financial minds.

When it collapsed, more than thirty-seven thousand investors lost money, including prominent celebrities such as Steven Speilberg, Larry King and Kevin Bacon.

The scheme looked great on paper. It had been established by a former chairman of the NASDAQ, Bernie Madoff, and had generated fantastic returns from its first day. It had been greenlit by regulators, investment managers and even pension funds.

Spotting a Ponzi scheme is easy in hindsight but very difficult ahead of its inevitable collapse. During its operation, the founders are usually the only people who know that they are operating a Ponzi. Everyone else - especially the investors - is (usually) entirely in the dark.

But what exactly is a Ponzi scheme? Or a pyramid scheme?

Before I answer those questions, let’s examine if crypto or even individual projects within crypto (I’m looking at you, Bitcoin) resemble either of these fraudulent schemes, along with the fifteen most common warning signs to watch out for!

Read more

At least that’s what many people who, six months ago, were either basking in record (primarily paper) profits (or, more likely, were wishing they were) would have you believe.

However, if you widen the lens of time to years rather than weeks, we have literally been at these prices before, just not with this psychological perspective.

Crypto progresses in waves of ebb and flow. Both sides generally catch most investors out, with the highs being higher than expected and the lows being lower than imagined. We can use history to determine where we will likely go next.

It is often said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

If you have read in the media or on social media that ‘crypto/Bitcoin is dead’, remember that Bitcoin has been declared dead almost 400 times since 2011, and if you had invested following 80% of these predictions, you would now be in profit!

If the last three months have told us anything, it is that we are in a crypto bear market.

A bear market is where prices are depressed while everyone psychologically adjusts. Descending prices causes investors to think more carefully about liquidity, short-term cash flow and risk than rising prices. After they have adjusted, which could be weeks or months, prices will appreciate again, following a catalyst. For Bitcoin, in particular, this catalyst is the highly predictable reward halving, explained in my book Crypto Profit.

Fortunately, I became interested in the crypto sector six months into the previous bear market (summer 2018). Therefore, I am not concerned about the current depressed prices (from a long-term perspective), which are currently well within the usual range of 85% from the peak ($68,990) to the trough (currently $17,600).

A bear market is akin to an evolutionary cull. Dinosaurs die, but (highly adaptable) birds remain. The sector will and is already experiencing the pruning of projects that took on too much risk (Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, and Luna/UST), taking out almost $100 billion in the process in realised losses against a $2+ trillion drop in the overall sector.

Projects that did not have a sustainable business plan or were scams have also been forced to face the music and will continue to do so.

More legitimate crypto companies will continue to lay off their staff, hired when revenue from trading fees contributed to bloated budgets, which are now unsustainable.

In addition, some of the marketing decisions of these companies, such as Crypto.com sponsoring a US stadium for $700 million in November 2021, now look a little foolhardy.

Despite how it feels to investors, all of this is healthy.

In November 2022, the crypto market was awash with unbridled optimism. Every project made investors money, no matter its quality, and everyone seemed convinced that ‘this was it’ for crypto. Using this as a sell signal is simple, but it’s not easy to spot the corresponding buy signal during what is now referred to as the ‘crypto winter.’

Now that the bloat, euphoria and chaos have gone, the market has lost its excitement (maybe drama is a better word?), is more transparent, and has more potential thanks to the upside created by depressed prices.

The one question on everyone’s lips is ‘when can I buy without a lot of pain’ - usually phrased as ‘Have we bottomed yet’?

The data tells us exactly when to expect the bottom of the market to be (it’s probably sooner than you think) and even what the price may be (it’s probably higher than you think)!

Let’s examine the data and find out.

Read more

Embedded within the Coinbase parameter1 is some plain text:

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”.

The very first block of Bitcoin referenced the financial issues that Bitcoin aimed to resolve.

Expliclty, Bitcoin is openly attacking an out-of-touch banking system founded on the financial quicksand of fiat currencies.

The same fiat currencies that continue to be actively mismanaged by corporate agents (corporate banks), governments and central banks with heavy economic vested interests.

Most despairingly, the corporate agents were aided and abetted in their destructive efforts rather than protected by the bodies that were supposed to regulate them (credit bureaus, rating agencies).

However, in 2009, Bitcoin had a more significant problem - no one had heard of it.

Read more

Whitepaper Twitter Website Explorer Analytics GitHub Chart

DeFiChain (DFI) began in 2019 as a project focused on providing Decentralised Finance (DeFi) solutions to as many crypto users as possible.

Unlike other blockchains with scalability, throughput and bandwidth issues, which ultimately result in increased costs and lower utility (Ethereum), DFI is deliberately niche in that it is not interested in being a ‘platform for everything’.

Instead, DFI wants to be the best (fastest, cheapest and most trusted) platform for (ideally, decentralised) financial services and applications.

Read more

Which are you?

Well, you are neither and both. Let me explain…

An individual investor is neither smart nor dumb 100% of the time; being smart or dumb should be viewed as a continuum.

The smartest investor can become a dumb money investor via ignorance, lack of due diligence, poor sleep, challenging personal circumstances, lack of critical thinking, impatience, fear or greed.

Not only does a smart money investor have to fight to stay smart, but a dumb money investor is also tempted to think they are smart money when they are not.

This is especially the case during dramatic price rises, usually when dumb money investors shout the loudest.

During these conditions, dumb money will usually outperform smart money - on paper - for a short time, only to dramatically (and quietly) implode when the market conditions become more subdued or loss-making.

Read more

You are considering holding assets with a crypto company.

This isn’t just any crypto company.

It’s a thriving crypto company with billions of dollars under management, paying excellent stable interest rates (up to 17%) on various crypto assets.

✔

It has a prominent (if a little bombastic) CEO with lots of crypto experience who holds weekly AMA’s (Ask Me Anything’s) on social media.

✔

Its native token is one of the best-performing assets of the year, which increased from $0.50 to over $8 in six months.

✔

The crypto company even has a very loyal social media following, who are quick to argue with critics and mock those who suggest selling the native token (CEL) in profit (i.e. me).

1/2 a ✔ (I would consider a following that is too loyal a red flag).

Despite all of these, I only held assets with the Celsius network for a short period in late 2020.

Why?

Read more